Sejin Park, How to concrete, 2018 © Sejin Park

When I first visited the artist's studio, the black paintings with layer after layer of devoted brush strokes filled with a long period of hesitation and passion had sucked everything in and left just the reflective layer of dark oil paint. Year after year passed, and at the end of a long period of waiting, I came to see the artist's paintings.

Park's painting, which considered depicting the beautiful a taboo, and portrayed things other than what the artist knows well, begins with color black, and shine from within itself. Countless layers of delicate images pile on top of each other one by one, producing a deep sense of space in darkness, and the paintings, as an outcome of a long period of precious labor, are each charged with it’s own story.

Park Sejin paints one painting after another in the slanted world and space, realizing that she's dreaming. In contrast to when she used to paint vast expansive world and space, Park claims that recently, she's fascinated with the idea of a large axis being slanted. Park attempts to capture unintentional layers of reflection created by accumulation of brush strokes, the infinite depth of space created in such way, and things like mountain, retaining wall and tent that reflect on the slanted hill or how objects overlap and mutate. She finds the landscapes she wants to portray in between the streets and walls of her neighborhood.


Sejin Park, Four trees, 2018 © Sejin Park

The artist who lives over the hills, along the slanted walls and where it all meets the mountain, comes across the old cement walls which she faces everyday, and capture traces of scenes which the walls face. In such remaining traces, the artist finds the scenes that she wishes to portray.

The traces on the walls become a landscape through the artist's misapprehension, while being understood through drawing like a picture puzzle. All retaining walls and cement walls in Park's work is an imprint of the life they face. The traces, mixed with moss, light, rain water, fungus and dirt, are recorded according to the space that stands ahead of it.

The cement wall which reflects the life it confronts seems like Park's own self portrait. The artist, who has gone through a difficult process of exposing her own honest thoughts, looks at herself through the wall. Painting the distant horizon of the earth that climbs to the eye-level, and the space beyond what is created in other layers, the artist aspires to keep on painting.

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